Fooled by Perception

It is natural to think that our perceptions are the ultimate reality because they are immediate to our experience. But do we know of anything outside of our own perceptions?

Things, from the very large to the very small, do not actually exist until they are observed.

The house next door does not exist until it is perceived. The palm of your hand does not exist until you perceive it.

Amazing, isn't it?

But these things are not physical things and therefore don't need to take on physical properties. It's okay that your friends don't exist until you perceive them because they exist entirely in your perception. Perception is simply what we experience when two or more things relate. We perceive this "geometry" of relationships and it is really all we ever knew.

We forget how we have come to perceive anything. We mistake a representation of a thing with the actual thing and forget that we did just that. We have become so familiar with this 'geometry' that it seems like reality.

Imagine a baby, learning a language for the first time. The words make no sense at first. It's just noise. But after the baby begins to relate the words with other words, concepts, actions, expressions, etc., it all makes sense. Finally, the words they hear are rich and become so ingrained in their experience that they could not imagine a world without them.

And so it is the same with these geometrical relationships.

Something can either be true, or it can be perceived. It cannot be both. We can be aware of something but not be aware of the truth of what it is. When the totality of something cannot be grasped in our perception, it appears infinite (such is your reality, seemingly infinite in every direction).

Consciousness and Being Human

Consciousness, or awareness, is the difference between two or more representations.

We are only aware of something because we compared it with something else.

We are only "aware" of ourselves because of these other things. This relationship is what we call consciousness.

You cannot possibly be aware of something directly. We only know of something in relation to other things. (Other things that cannot be directly perceived, as well.)

Consciousness does not actually exist. You are not aware of anything directly, including "you".

For example, when you look at the Sun you are actually perceiving it as it existed in the past (approximately 8 minutes ago). Similarly, the moon, the house across the street, and your hand. It seems like "now" but it's not. You are also not looking at your hand directly but interpreting signals in your brain. We can only be aware of things indirectly through their relationship with other things.

Thus, humanness is a state of mind rather than a state of physicality.

Your change because your interactions with other representations change.

We have as many consciousnesses as we have representations. Who you think you are is but a fraction of your complete bodily consciousness.

Our physical body is a massive collection of both physical and non-physical consciousness. (In a similar manner, our mind operates in both physical and non-physical stages.) Approximately 100 trillion bacterial cells, each with its own individual consciousness and thoughts, inhabit our body. We have 10 times more bacterial cells in our body than human cells. What we refer to as human DNA actually has more than 1,000 times more microbial genes than what we think of as human genes. We are, in reality, not human.

As soon as we are born, bacteria move in. They stake claims in our digestive and respiratory tracts, our teeth, our skin. They establish increasingly complex communities, like a forest that gradually takes over a clearing. By the time we’re a few years old, these communities have matured, and we carry them with us, more or less, for our entire lives. Our bodies harbor 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering our human cells 10 to one. It’s easy to ignore this astonishing fact.

...“Human beings are not really individuals; they’re communities of organisms,” says McFall-Ngai. It’s not just that our bodies serve as a habitat for other organisms; it’s also that we function with them as a collective. As the profound interrelationship between humans and microbes becomes more apparent, the distinction between host and hosted has become both less clear and less important — together we operate as a constantly evolving man-microbe kibbutz. Which raises a startling implication: If being Homo sapiens through and through implied a certain authority over our corporeal selves, we are now forced to relinquish some of that control to our inner-dwelling microbes. Ironically, the human ingenuity that drives us to understand more about ourselves is revealing that we’re much less “human” than we once thought. [from "The Body Politic"]

To you, an aggregated consciousness, riding a bicycle is a simple activity. It does, however, require the rapid execution of successive calculations of physics, trigonometry, and calculus. Calculations that would be quite impossible for anyone to do (rapidly, if at all) with their brain are easily and quickly performed by the other types of consciousnesses in their person. You quite often and easily perform calculus at speeds that would make Isaac Newton sweat. We take these abilities (or consciousnesses) for granted and say that it just comes naturally to us, without ever actually knowing how we do it. Other types of animals have also been shown to perform calculus. (Perhaps researchers never thought to apply the same question to humans fetching balls or doing any sort of physical task.)

We can perform calculations of physics without thinking about them because parts of us do make those calculations. We are then "intuitively aware" of the result because the consciousness that has figured it out has formed a relationship with us.

These microbes pass from one person to another, and from system to system. If, for example, a microbe in your body has figured out how to perform a certain feat it could spread to other people. They would then know how to perform the same feat (or have the same idea, thought, etc) because they have become "infected" with the microbe.

How Does Consciousness Work?

Think of your consciousness like a book. Each word in the book represents a concept. Then words are grouped together into related concepts. You know what each word means but there is no meaning and life until you put them together. The meaning of all these words is determined by the relationship between the words. Similarly, you are aware of each part of your self but there is no consciousness until the parts begin to relate. What we think of as awareness arises from relationships.

Now imagine that a small portion of the words in the book changes constantly. At every moment a new batch is added, shifted, or taken away. At each of these moments the book changes into a slightly different form, altering your awareness. If you were alert and able to read as fast as the book was being changed it would seem as though everything were happening "now". If you were not as alert and unable to read as fast as the changes, it would seem as though a new entity, "past" was being created. Then you may realize the level of your awareness depended not upon the speed of your reading, but upon how involved you are in the drama the words illustrate. Some stories in the book you find more interesting than others so you focus on those words more. Suddenly, it appears as though these dramas are "close" to you in space and time while others appear more distant.

To use another example, if you have a well-kept house and decide to not fix a second-floor window that was recently broken then the relationship of that window to its environment will change. It will change the other windows because they will also adopt this representation of "brokenness" to some degree. The entire property can be affected by this small change in relationships.

These relationships are integral to our universe and oue lives. We naturally want to create relationships with something... anything. We constantly seek out opportunities to create a relationship with someone or something else to further the illusion of our existence. A person, place, thing, idea, anything that is or can be represented. We give names to this consciousness-creating process: love, lust, hate, obsession, laughter, passion, anger, fetish, happiness, etc. It doesn't matter what kind of relationship it is. We create relationships in order to feel like we exist.

When you interact with something you are sharing a relationship with it. You must first be aware of something (to any degree) in order to interact with it. Consciousness is interaction.

We cannot be aware of something without interacting with it somehow. Anything you are aware of you are interacting with. For example, we cannot see a distant star without a photon from it interacting directly with our sense of sight. You cannot smell dinner on a plate without the molecules in the food interacting with your olfactory neurons. Similarly, we cannot think of someone else without their representation(s) directly interacting with our thoughts. Talking to someone on a telephone may sound like their voice but it is, instead, a representation of their voice. Talking to them in person is also a representation of their voice (our brain's representation). Looking at someone it may appear that you are seeing them for what they are but you are, instead, looking at your brain's representation of them. These things are not the things themselves, but representations.

Your body is most relative to your perspective, so you perceive that more constantly than you do your home, surroundings, spouse, etc.

Everything that you know is in your perception. Every perception is uniquely yours. Every perception is you. And since there is nothing but You to perceive, there is no you. Don't try to trick yourself by asking your friends what they perceive. They can tell you that they see something different but your friends and their words still exist in your perception.

I often hear people talk about how they believe that they create their own reality but don't see how they create what they think of as the negative things.

Perhaps they think when their body gets sick, somehow they did not make it so.

That when they stub their toe, somehow it was the object's fault or they simply didn't see it.

It's not that these things are created in their reality. Or that they create their reality. Nothing is really created. But everything is perceived.

Creation doesn't exist. We use these terms to reference some other process.

If we write a poem, for example, we're not creating something new. We're simply exploring relationships. The words were already there but it becomes relevant to us because we are creating a poem for ourselves.

When something new happens, it is the same thing. You are exploring a relationship. The elements were there already but you are in a way "seeing what happens" when you combine one thing with another thing.

It doesn't actually matter what you perceive, as long as you perceive something.

The idea is to "form relationships". However, the value of each relationship is not the same as the perception of it.

In this sense, at times it may be "better" to perceive of something you consider very bad than something very good.

You're looking at the shape of the relationship, not what your brain interprets the relationship to look like today.

What do we perceive? We perceive of things most relative to us in the here/now. Things not as relative to us are more distant in time/space.

So, your body is most relative to your perspective. So it seems that it's always following you around. Your toes are not as relative to your perspective as your nose and mouth are, and are further away in distance.

Your watch is sometimes relative to your perspective so you may only wear it sometimes.

Your workplace is less relative to your perspective, so it is even more distant.

And so on...

However, it is about the value rather than the perception. The place you grew up or went to school may be very relative to your current perspective but be distant in time space. But what you don't see is that the "shape" of your school or hometown is still around you in a different form.

When we are talking with a friend we must ask ourselves, "What is it that we're doing?" Are we talking with a friend or exploring our own values?

When we perceive of a distant object, is it that the photons from the object are hitting the cells in our eyes or that the distant object is us; a less-relative value in our perspective and we only interpret distance in such a way?

How Do My Thoughts Become Reality?

You do not think your thoughts but perceive them. You choose to perceive them, if you will. Thoughts are sensations, like smells or visual stimuli. It's kind of like drinking milk with your eyes closed. Everything in your environment says that you will perceive the sensation of milk in your mouth. Similarly, everything in your perspective enables you to perceive exactly the next thought you will have. Your thoughts are the logical result of the relationships in your perspective.

Similar representations tend to group together and become realms of consciousness and experience. The closer a representation is to a grouping the more powerful is the realm's affect. (From the graphic to the right, an "emotional" representation can become more attracted to the physical realm and take on physical properties. A physical representation can be attracted to —or repelled by— the microbial realm and take on —or discard— microbial properties, etc.)

But what does that mean for us?

Imagine a distant object as a thought which has not taken on physical attributes and a near object as that which is relative to our physicality. You could say that the distant object is indeed a physical thing. In some ways that would be so. It is not really, however, in your physical realm of experience and is to your perspective somewhere between physical and not-physical.

Thoughts take on physical form as the thought is expressed more physically, changing your perception of it. Bring the thought into your physical experience and you will experience it physically. This could be as simple as drawing a picture of the house you want instead of just desiring it. You are physicalizing the thought, re-representing it.